The invisible character in unix/linux

This used to be the trick to hide folders in unix last time (not sure whether it’s still been used nowadays). Sometimes even the GUI file manager can’t go into the folders due to this unprintable control character.

It will appear something like this when you do a ls -al on shell prompt:

So now we know what control character was used, another problem rises. Trying to change directory to that folder by directly typing the exact control character (^A^A and ..^C^A^C) is almost useless, as it will become something else, for example ^C is actually an operation break/cancel command.

The trick is to use ^V (control+V) whenever you want to use any of the control character. So in this case if we want to change directory to folder ^A^A, this is what we should do:

admin# cd ^V^A^V^A

and same goes to the other one

admin# cd ..^V^C^V^A^V^C

Same thing can be done if you decide to remove the folders.

I had a chance to try this on Mac iBook G4 which is actually a unix based OS (darwin). Here is what I found.

Darwin will display the control character as ? (question mark), so our above example will looks like this on darwin: